Children's Books

By LINDA WERTHEIMER; Linda Wertheimer is a host of ''All Things Considered'' on National Public Radio.

Published: October 7, 1990

RICE WITHOUT RAIN

FITGBy Minfong Ho.

236 pp. New York:

Lothrop, Lee & Shepard. $12.95.

(Ages 12 and up)

MINFONG HO, the author of ''Sing to the Dawn,'' has written a fictional account for teen-agers of events surrounding the military takeover of the Government of Thailand in 1976, and the killing of students at Thammasart University in Bangkok in October of that year. In her novel ''Rice Without Rain,'' the story is told through the experiences that year of Jinda, a 17-year-old whose father, the leader of a small rice-farming village in northern Thailand, is persuaded by students from the university to join in a rent strike rather than give the landlord the traditional half of a poor rice harvest. After he is arrested, Jinda travels to Bangkok to join the university students and demonstrate for his release. She is then witness to the brutal attack in which 46 students are killed, and she and some of the students escape from Bangkok. Returning to her village she finds her father dead.

Despite its strong political subject, ''Rice Without Rain'' is written in such a lilting voice, and so romantically, that it's hard to believe fully. The title comes from a Thai folk song, and the language often reads as though it were translated, not composed in English. There are delicate descriptions of rice fields and flowers and a rather romantic vision of village life. Jinda is fascinated by the handsome university student who helps organize the rent strike in her village and falls in love with him.

But the novel attempts to go beyond romance. When a young revolutionary tries to make Jinda and her father symbols of gallant Thai peasantry, she resists. A practical country girl, she suspects him of wanting her father to stay in prison and remain a rallying point for the students. Jinda's wide-eyed view of the students in the movement also strikes a nice note. She finds most of them boring, preoccupied with theories that have nothing to do with her. And when Minfong Ho, who grew up and was educated in Thailand and now lives in Ithaca, N. Y., writes about the brutality of the attack on the students, the illness and death of her sister's baby and the birth of that sister's second child, she is explicit, if dainty, in her descriptions.

Ms. Ho has set herself a strange task with this book and only partly succeeds. She has tried to write a political novel about the student movement in Thailand to rally the peasants and achieve reform, but she has camouflaged it as a hybrid - part teen-age romance, part anthropological introduction to youth in a faraway land. The failure comes, I think, in the fact that young people, her contemporaries and friends, did risk everything and die in Thailand in 1976. The effort to explain them to young Americans seems to me to require a grittier effort, perhaps aimed at older teen-agers.

Although ''Rice Without Rain'' contains descriptions of murder and oppression it still seems to slip through the grim events without coming to grips with what happened. Young people in this country watched their contemporaries in China demonstrating for democracy and dying in Tiananmen Square in the summer of 1989. Presumably they tried, at least briefly, to imagine themselves taking such risks, caring that much about a cause. A novel about a similar time in Thailand ought to explain and amplify such stirring and frightening experiences. It ought to help American readers to understand what passions moved the young Thai people to do what they did, young people who are, after all, almost the same age as the adolescent readers of this book. ''Rice Without Rain'' seems, to me, a little too lovely.